Cussing My Head Off ...

“I’m pissed off, and I am not going to take it anymore.”  Was that one strong enough?  How about – “I’m mad as hell, and I am not going to take it anymore.”  Any better?  Maybe better to be more simplistic, something on the order of just plain old – “damn it”.  Have I communicated my frustration effectively yet?  Do you get it that I am mad?  And being a follower of our Creator God, does my choice of language seem contradictory to you?  Most Christians I know think that cussing, or swear words, are evil and in fact a sin.  I say they are wrong, here’s why …

Ironically, my thinking on this topic has been heavily influenced by two figures, George Carlin and Jesus Christ.  Find that hard to believe?  But they seem to agree on this topic.  George points out that when you examine our language, our speaking, and our communication in a deeper thoughtful manner – you realize that all we have is words.  Some words are spoken to generate an emotional response, some are considered slang or having multiple meanings, some are considered guttural in nature and are used mostly for shock value.  It is the last category that tends to comprise what we now call swear words, cursing, or like they say it down south – cussing.

But any modern curse word you can think of is really only a word.  No different than any other word, except in its commonly held definition and purpose.  A highly derogatory word for a woman’s genitalia for example, is often used to describe a particularly objectionable woman herself.  Also used, is a technical reference to the female of the canine species or perhaps references to general sexual promiscuity.  You see, I have just called to mind three words in your head without actually spelling them out for you.  But everyone knows what I am talking about.  It is the application of these three words that conjures up the “shock value” of the speech itself.  And thus, three words with only slightly relevant associations, become swear words in the English vernacular.

George Carlin nearly pioneered this thinking in his now infamous bit entitled “Seven words you cannot say on television”.  I love that one.  What’s more I used to play his CD of it, in my car on family vacations with my young teenagers in the car.  Does that shock you?  It shouldn’t.  George merely makes the point that our language is a product of our thinking, and our association of words is largely dictated to us.  We rarely think independently from the masses, and therefore we deserve what we get, be it in politics, language or society in general.  My intention was not to teach my children “how” to swear effectively – they would learn that really well in school.  My intention was to teach them something much deeper – how we speak is an indication of how we think, and what we value.

This is where Jesus continues the lesson.  In His day, swearing had a bit different meaning than ours.  Swearing or vowing in His day, was language used to commit oneself to a binding agreement or contract between two people.  If you swore to provide 2 cows to your neighbor by the 25^th of the month, on the head of your first born daughter – then you better fulfill the contract, or your daughter’s head would literally be cut off.  It was no light matter.  The words were strictly and literally enforced.  Christ pointed out the fallacy of this thinking by advising we “simply let our yes be yes and our no mean no”.  He further pointed out that we “control” nothing.  “Leopards cannot change their spots.”  “We cannot add one day to our lives by simply wanting it”.  In effect we can’t control anything, so it is pointless to swear before God, or before each other as to the validity of our commitments.

But Christ had more to witness on the topic.  James and John a couple of His first picks for disciples were known throughout their home geography as “sons of thunder”.  The literal meaning of this meant – they swore like sailors – conjure up an image of a Marine with Terets.  And these 2 were the first representatives of the meek, mild, savior.  Peter went off half-cocked all the time, and had no formal education; you can only imagine the choice of words these “fishermen” were used to saying prior to really knowing Jesus.  Yet there is no written reprimand of Christ to correct the language of any of His disciples in the entire New Testament.  And in my reading, I have not found the use of curse words in what they said.

Christ too got angry more than once, when he saw how His temple was being treated by the folks who were supposed to be ministering to their fellow believers.  The level of apostasy that turns true religion into a purely financial industry made Christ very angry.  Enough for Him to take physical action and “cleanse” the temple by overturning the tables setup for money making, and scaring the money changers out of the place.  But nowhere in scripture was there recorded a tirade of curse words during the process.  Nor are the pictures of Christ using a horse whip accurate.  For a brief moment, divinity simply flashed through His humanity, and when the money changers looked at Him their own sinfulness was revealed.  This image was too intense for them, and they fled on their own from the revelation.  The witness to this truth, is the fact that immediately after the “cleansing”, Christ ministered to the children and believers who had come to the temple.  If you run screaming swear words, and cracking a horse whip, into a room of children they will be the first ones out the door (and you should prepare for a heavy lawsuit and criminal penalty). 

More important to Christ than your ability to speak, or your choice of words, was the thoughts behind them.  Using appropriate legal language to break the commitment to honor their parents, was deemed wrong by Christ in His time.  Christ saw that commitment as binding for life.  Every time local leaders tried to trick Christ with no-win questions, he would confound them by revealing their motives, and showing them what was really important.  Using religion to justify murder was how our Savior was killed on this earth.  Upright, believers, who professed a lifelong belief in the coming Messiah, refused to accept the truth when they heard it, and using proper language and horrific motives, crucified the very Messiah they should have worshipped.

And we have still REFUSED to learn this lesson in Christianity.  Christian beliefs are SO often associated with hate speech.  Christians carrying signs at protest to offer death to homosexuals.  Christians who take it upon themselves to reason they should kill abortion doctors in order spare the “innocent”.  Christians who devoutly support a death penalty in spite of evidence that many “innocents” have been wrongly executed, and even those who are guilty are offered hope through a plan of salvation by God.  Christians, content to sit in judgment of others, while full of sin in their own lives.  Complete hypocrites.  Complete abomination – liars, whoremongers, adulterers and these are those who profess to serve our God.  And you worry about cussing?

Shock jocks, use language to achieve the exact same result as those who swear.  But they do it for money.  Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern to name a few.  Ironically, I hear less condemnation on Howard’s show than on Rush’s.  But then I hear no hope on Howard or Rush.  I am angry because I want the hate speech to stop where Christians are concerned.  Angrier still because I know the hate speech comes from a heart diseased with the same condition.  Words do reflect our motives, and our attitudes.  When our minds are occupied by love, and by the transforming power of our Creator God, we do NOT condemn our brothers.  Instead we see our own need of Christ, and simply love our brother unconditionally.  His need of Christ and reform of his life, is exactly like our own.  We are all THE SAME.  We all desperately need Christ.  We all radically need a change in our thinking and our motives, that will lead to a much better level of spoken words.

Christ focused on the motives of what we say, not on the particular words.  He sought to correct problems where they originate, not just superficial symptoms of much larger problems that lay underneath.  I can politely, in the sweetest of words, declare my absolute apathy for your life and your problems.  More to the point, I can lie and fake a superficial interest in you as a person, and have no real underlying interest in you.  In this, I reveal the absolute lack of God in me, and overabundance of evil.  Better I tell you how fricking much I love you and mean it; than use extravagant words to convey no real emotion and leave you alone.  I wish Christian’s would get pissed off, at hypocrisy in their own lives.  I wish they would get a passion for love back in their hearts.  I wish they would hate seeing their religion turned into a simple financial enterprise.  If enough of us did, we would not have to worry about cussing, we would be too busy loving, and the whole world would change for the better …

Used Cars and Junk Food ...

Hey buddy, wanna buy some snake oil for what ails ya?  In the late 1800’s a new miracle cure was “discovered” in the form of snake oil.  Its actual ingredients were mostly a toxic blend of chemicals with the exception of the large amount of opiates in the mix.  The liquid heroine did as promised in so much as it made you forget whatever symptoms you were suffering from for a while.  Then it gave you something not printed in the fine print (lawyers had not invented fine print yet), it gave you worse problems than you had before.  I sometimes wonder why our society will accept second rate goods that satisfy the short term needs, at the entire expense of the long term.

Its like the prayer you hear so often … “Lord, give me patience, NOW!!!!”  We want everything we want, and we want it now.  But like the hard lesson to learn -  “there is no free lunch”; we realize there is a cost to everything we want.  But we prefer to pay our costs on credit rather than in cash.  Credit hurts less, at least until the bill comes in.  Then when in panic from what we have spent, we remember our get-out-of-jail-free-card – the minimum monthly payment – a mere fraction of what we owe (by my calculations that fraction would be multiplied over 10 years to pay the debt).  Give me now, pay you later; and then it mystifies us as a nation when our national debt gets out of hand.

What is it about instant gratification that so entangles us?  This idea permeates our culture.  You can find it everywhere from how we shop, to how we eat, to how we travel to our needed destinations.  Some call it convenience, others call it how a society advances, I just call it – “the gimmee’s”.  With the notion of “instant”, we sacrifice most of the things that lend actual value to something.  Think about it.  How good are instant friends?  How long lasting are instant romances?  How well constructed are homes made instantly?  I’ll give you instant messaging, and instant coffee; but my point is the same – cutting down the time it takes to build something – has an almost proportionate adverse affect on the quality of that something.

Allow me to demonstrate my premise.  If I could offer you a dining experience at the nations favorite McDonald’s for some “grade A, prime USDA, beef”; or offer you the same worded menu from a much lesser known, smaller chain of restaurants called “The Palm” located in most major cities, catering to a gourmet steak crowd.  Where would you prefer to dine?  Depends on the time you have perhaps?  Depends on how you are dressed perhaps?  Can’t say money, cause it is my treat.  If you have a little more time, and are not still dressed in your pajamas, The Palm offers a substantially better meal.

And here is the kicker; it is not just that you can hardly compare the quality of the taste of the food between the two restaurants.  It is that the quality of the nutritional value is extraordinarily better at The Palm, than at McDonalds.  A film-maker made a documentary called “Supersize Me” where he ate nothing but McDonalds food, supersized whenever offered by the employee behind the counter for 30 days.  He nearly died.  You could not only eat at the Palm for 30 days, if you balanced your selections, and insured you ate vegetables as well as the meats there, you could probably improve your overall state of health after eating nothing but their menu for 30 days.  Their selection includes the finest foods from many food groups, and is prepared very well.

But in fairness, you just can’t make food that good in less than 5 minutes.  You can’t have it sitting in a warmer waiting to be eaten for an hour and achieve the same quality control.  The only way to consistently deliver food fast and cheap is to streamline the menu, and the cooking process, until what is left, looks just like McDonalds.  It takes time to properly age, cut, and barbeque over an open flame, a filet mignon steak.  A frozen pre-prepared burger patty made of mysterious ingredients purported to be pure beef, cooked in a friar and microwave is done in seconds.  Arguably they will both kill you over time if that is all you eat, but you can see how the effects of time and effort make a difference in the end product of what you consume.

But our learned behavior of instant gratification goes well beyond how we eat and where we dine, it infects how we shop and what we buy.  The cardinal sin for a vendor is to be out of stock on an item.  This is the primary driving condition to move your customer to another vendor.  Even a higher price will not drive customers away as quickly as being out of stock.  People will pay more, if they can still get it now.  If they have to wait, they are likely to look elsewhere.  So once the shelves are properly stocked, the attention moves to the consumer.  Everything is ready to be taken home now, but the consumer may not have the funds to cover ALL the items they have been trained to want by a barrage of media advertising targeting their demographics.  This is why credit was invented.  People get to buy, stores make money, banks make a fortune, the rich get richer, they pay for more advertising, and the cycle repeats over and over and over again.

OK fine instant gratification is part of our society or culture; surely it is not a part of our religion is it?  Yup.  We look at God as “instant Santa”.  We look to prayer for “instant healing”.  We like our religious ceremonies to start on time and more importantly to finish on time so we can get to lunch as our hunger arises.  Even in our religion we carry over our attitudes of give it to me now.  Why can’t I be perfect now?  Why can’t God come now?  Why isn’t my marriage or my family perfect already?  The idea of long-suffering is about as foreign to us as is the Quran to a Christian.  Indeed we know nothing of “long-suffering”, our entire society and governmental structures are designed to keep us from knowing anything about the word.

But how long did the world suffer in the agony of extreme evil before the flood washed it away the first time?  How long did Abraham wait for his promised son and promised land?  How long did Israel toil in slavery waiting for a deliverer before Moses arrived in the court of Pharaoh?  How long did we await the Messiah the first time?  And since then, how long?  Nothing of extraordinary value comes in an instant; it comes in time frames sometimes beyond our boundaries of mortality.  And during all this time of waiting, it is our Lord who suffers the most.  It is He who is most pure who misses the companionship of His children who refuse to come home.  It is His heart that breaks waiting for us to discover what He longs to offer us – an real and immediate escape from the pain that infects our lives.

But even accepting His gift takes us time to get used to.  It too is a process of change, not the work of an instant as yet.  Our humanity is simply not equipped to deal with it all at once.  It is like taking a starving African child from his desert home where he has not eaten in weeks and then feeding him a feast all at once – it would kill him.  He must eat slowly, with small quantities at first, until his digestive system has time to repair and rebuild.  It takes time to enter a condition of starvation; it takes time to exit it.  Were we to see all the evil that infects our lives at one time, the revelation would kill us.  It would literally break our diseased hearts.  This is why Moses could not look on the face of God.  In that glance Moses would see purity and by definition would reveal in himself the evil that still plagued his life and soul.  Evil cannot stand in the presence of God and so Moses would have fallen. It was enough to see the back of God.

It is the work of the evil one, to convince us to take less than we deserve.  He packages it well.  He is a master marketer.  He makes the counterfeits sound better than their originals, but they are always lacking.  Who would rather have a used Ford, when they could own a new Mercedes?  Who would rather choose a Big Mac over a Filet Mignon?  Who would rather have a dresser from Rooms to Go, or a hand carved Italian Armoire with designs from an artist of the Renaissance?  It is not about finer things as much as it is about how we have been trained to want less than what God offers.  We are trained to take the quick, the fast, and the cheap.  How disappointing to a God who would create nothing less than perfection for us to occupy for eternity.

Next time you are confronted with the temptations to accept a cheap satanic counterfeit for something God would have you really enjoy, why not go for the gold standard.  Marriage, unity, intimacy, and vulnerability beat any kind of cheap sexual thrill that destroys relationships and ruins a body before it has a chance to experience what divinity intended.  Gourmet foods of a balanced nature are far better for mind and body, than the fast crap you can pick up from an open car window.  Mild repetitive exercise is so much better than perpetual couch potato.  Waiting for an item you cannot now afford, keeps your precious cash in the bank, and may teach you to prioritize your wants, your needs, and perhaps forego what is merely learned marketing behavior …

Credit Where Credit Is Due ...

There is new competition in the fight against additions and addictive disorders.  Instead of your traditional 12-step programs, now enters the age of self-help once again.  A recent media personality on CNN requested for viewers to email her with stories of addictions they have overcome, presumably to use on-air while discussing this topic.  It raises an interesting question: Can you truly and permanently overcome addiction by yourself?

If the answer to this question is yes, then those who continue to suffer with addiction do so from weak minds, or rather weak wills.  It implies that the addict deserves his condition, is ultimately responsible for his condition, and could at will (perhaps guided by the new onslaught of self-help books in this area), just say no.  Nancy Reagan was widely ridiculed for this proposal some time ago, but current thinking has once again broached the subject.

But to isolate your thinking around just the question of self-victory or not, is a bit too limited for those who accept the premise of a loving creator God.  For if again the answer is yes, you can indeed overcome addiction by yourself, does it not raise some other interesting questions.  For example, can you truly love someone without knowing our Creator God?  Many around the world profess love for each other, who do not believe in any god, let alone our God.  Do their professions of love ring true?

I guess the answer to that question goes back to how you define love in the first place.  If you define love by the example our God has given us, then our very basic picture of love would include … self sacrifice, serving others with no thought of reward or gain of any kind, humility, forgiveness, unconditional acceptance, mercy to those without, giving more to enemies than they would take, offering kind words to everyone, finding the value in each individual.  These are just a few of the very demonstrable traits of love our Creator God has personally shown us.  Do those unconnected with our God use this definition of the feelings they call love?  Or is love-apart-from-God really only an internal feeling of euphoria brought on by chemical reactions in the brain when attracted to another individual.  These feelings are often intense, but seldom last life times, and in point of fact, are very self serving in nature.  In fairness, they were only meant to establish connections, not prolong them.

But if you accept that you can conquer your own addictions by sheer force of will, and that anyone can love even if they are unacquainted with our God, then perhaps you might also accept that if you can perfectly keep the law of God, you would then be worthy of heaven itself?  It is surprising how closely the answers to these 3 questions can be linked.  Why can’t man save himself, if he has the power of will to overcome his evil addictions, and apparently the internal ability to perfectly create love for others within himself?  Is not perfect love, and perfect adherence to the law, the two conditions we expect to see in heaven when we get there?

All this kind of thinking is designed for one thing: to focus attention on self and away from our Savior.  It is easier sometimes to talk about our Creator God, than our Savior God (even though they are same being).  Creator refers to an event long ago and merely establishes ownership or dominance; whereas “Savior” defines our weakness and need of salvation in present terms.  This entire line of thinking that focus’ on self-reliance and independence is designed for nothing more than diverting the mind and eyes away from Jesus Christ.  While we do not look to our true Savior, we replace Him with a more popular alternative – ourselves.  We like the idea of earning heaven more than inheriting it as a gift.  We like the idea that we could by force of will, learn to belong in heaven, rather than have to admit our complete inability to change, and our desperate need of a Savior.  In short we like the illusion of control.

But control is no more than illusion.  When gathered many years from now on streets of gold with no names, the redeemed throngs will have one thing in common in the personal stories of their salvation from evil – Jesus Christ.  Jesus will be the hero of every single story.  No man will stand and say he is there by might, by sheer force of will, or through his stringent ability to keep the law.  Everyone will acknowledge they are there through the mercy, love, and forgiveness of a God who alone is worthy of praise.  In humility we will recognize our former conditions as addicts of evil, hooked on the junk we call “fun” in our lives, powerless to overcome the self inflicted pain and evil that masquerades as requirements.  Christ alone could save us.  And when there, Christ alone will have saved us.  For without a savior there can be no salvation.

Our society is bent around the notion of insuring we get the proper credit for our accomplishments.  We consider it a form of severe betrayal for someone else to “grab” the credit for our own good works.  When this occurs, we pursue the truth to vindicate our good names, and insure the credit-grabber is rightfully derided and cast down.  But to what purpose?  Ego perhaps.  We feed the engine of self aggrandizement by assuming we could accomplish anything on our own in the first place. 

In truth you cannot name one single accomplishment in your life that was not aided or influenced by others.  Your childhood teachers, both parents, family, and professionals, had much to do with any mental, or physical ability you tout today.  Genetics play a role in your aptitudes and abilities.  Efforts at work often rely on the tools and work of others.  For instance a brilliant never-seen-before all-encompassing financial spreadsheet analysis, required the software tool Excel, a working PC computer, a working operating system (haha), and countless other inventions before your masterpiece could be constructed.  You drive to work in a car you did not invent, you eat food you did not grow, and rely on currency you do not control.  In short your life builds on the work and accomplishments of almost everyone around you.  No man is an island, is more true than you realize.  Therefore “your” accomplishments can hardly be called “solo” or independent efforts.  Yet the craving for credit remains.

The concept of dependence however runs exactly opposite of growing or feeding our ego’s.  We wish to find self-worth from within, but it cannot be measured there, for the measuring scale is simply too small.  In truth, our worth is beyond measure, but is derived from the mystery of why our Savior God would yield up His perfect life, to spare only me.  Our Savior defines love in a way we wish to know more about, and will require an infinite amount of time to really understand.  Our dependence, our weakness, does not diminish our self-worth.  It acknowledges the truth about where our worth originates from.  All credit is due to our Creator who Redeemed us and recreated the new creatures we are to become.

It is in our weakness that His strength is made perfect.  This sentiment of scripture was not merely to point out our physical frailty, but to reinforce our need of a Savior of our characters, our souls.  We are not designed for fighting evil, we are sheep in need of a shepherd, not a wolf contending against another for food.  We are to be as innocent as lambs, and harmless as doves, but wise as serpents.  Discerning evil allows us to call out for the help that will save us, it does not prepare us for battle.  We need not surrender to evil, but to call the only force capable of defeating it into our lives, our minds, our hearts, and our hands.  We yield up our wills to the One who saves us from ourselves.

Instead of buying into the lie of self-control and self-reliance; why not accept the truth that His gift is enough to save even you.  Why not place your burden of evil, your heaviness of soul, your guilt of conscience and your need for change on the shoulders of He who can bare this burden, and return to you rest.  Trade your anxiety for peace.  Trade your worry for absolute assurance.  Trade your fear for trust.  And live a life where credit just does not seem to matter anymore …

Scream Bloody Murder ...

Just when you thought the reputation of a Christian could not sink any lower in the media, it finds a way to disappoint you further.  And per usual, the problem comes from within once again – this time, a Baptist minister was featured on CNN literally preaching for the death of our President O’Bama.  He said and I quote … “People say I am just not in favor with his policies.  That is not true.  I hate the man himself.  I want God to kill him and send him to hell right now rather than later.”  One of his black parishioners was then interviewed, whereupon he completely AGREED with his pastor.  This was the same parishioner who carried an AR-15 rifle to a town hall where the President spoke.

Christ said “love your enemies”, the minister and at least a few of his congregation called for our President’s death.  How anyone can call themselves a follower of Christ and then ignore His central teaching is the height of hypocrisy.  But to use scripture to justify these calls for death seems to define blasphemy for me.  Why is it that those who think themselves moral and supporters of “life” are so quick to call for murder, whether by the state or by God, they seem to have no problem demanding death for those they disagree with.

Christ gave Himself for those who did not love Him.  He works on the hearts of those who curse His name.  He offers love and unconditional acceptance to people who label themselves his enemies.  Christ, and therefore Christians, should be in the business of redemption, of reclamation, of renewal.  Condemnation has no part in this work.  Calls for death are the exact opposite of the ministry of Christ.  Satan takes great pleasure in seeing his words be attributed to God.  He takes great delight in people believing God said what in point of fact, the master of evil was behind.

It is no secret that last president George W. Bush was my political nemesis.  I disagreed with every policy he enacted, almost every statement he made, and I firmly believe he did more to destroy our values and our constitution than any predecessor in our history.  There were times when I wondered if he was competing for the role of antichrist.  But on his worst day, I never even imagined anyone would call for his death.  Agree or not, he was our president.  His office should be revered even if the man is not.  And in truth, his act of sending medicine to Africa was charity that affects and saves lives.  Even he is worthy of praise for this act.  Everyone has some redeeming value.  And in any case who am I to judge another, more to point who are these people to do the same?

There are Bible thumpers who try to use the words of David where he calls for the demise of his enemies as justification for their own calls for death and justice.  But when you read the scripture more closely you find that David was always concerned with how others would see God if he were to perish.  David wanted the world to see God as a strong God through the destruction of his enemies.  David called to God when his own life was threatened.  He cried in mortal fear to his strong God.  But when dangers had passed, David spoke endlessly of God’s mercy and love to him.  To turn words spoken in fear, into cold blooded intentional calls for murder because of a political dispute, is to mimic the behavior of Satan himself.

Then there is the subtle discrimination our country seems to show to Christians who utter hate speech, over say Muslim Clerics for example.  If a Muslim Cleric were speaking in such terms I dare say the Christians would be gathering the pitchforks and torches to take of the problem personally.  But where is the outrage for what this Baptist minister has said.  Christians should disavow this minister as quickly as we would any other religion where this kind of hate speech was uttered, say in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan for example.  Hate is hate, no matter who says the words.  They all come from the same source – the master of evil, Satan.  God has nothing to do with hate.

It is ironic that most calls for justice are a mask for a call for vengeance.  The same Bible thumpers who quote David asking God to destroy his enemies, also quote scripture where justice is defined such as the famous “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, life for a life” series of texts.  This standard of what justice requires is quoted out of an entire volume of text devoted to the definition of love, of grace, and of mercy.  True justice demands our death.  But the entire plan of Salvation declares that mercy and forgiveness are GREATER than justice.  The gift we have been given is beyond what justice demands.  Justice was satisfied in the torture and death of He who was innocent, yet took our punishment.  In Christ the demand for justice was answered, and in the same Christ is mercy and forgiveness defined.  Those who claim His name and who have been forgiven should not dare to turn around and begin accusing others.

Christians should be known for the love they exude.  Christ himself said to “love your enemies” to do good to those who mean you harm, to give to those who would steal from you.  Nowhere do you see Christ demanding justice, seeking punishment and death for those who disagreed with Him, or condemning those who we all knew deserved it.  Christ was and remains the pictures of mercy, love, and forgiveness.  It is easy to love those who love you.  But to show love to those who hate you, or who ridicule and persecute you is more akin to loving like God loves.

The entirety of the Bible refutes the claim that Sinners are the enemy.  Sin or evil is the enemy, not the poor unfortunate, addicted, stupid, diseased beings … us … who engage in it.  We are the targets of redemption.  We are the erring children of God who He wishes to bring out of our self-inflicted pain and in to the life He has prepared for us.  He hates the sin within us, but not us.  He hates the pain we bring on ourselves and on others when we embrace evil and sin, but He does not hate us.  It is more pity than anger.  It is more tender than harsh.  We are the object of His affection, not the target of His retribution.  To call for the death of sinners is to call for suicide.  To call for the death of sin, is to submit the will to Christ and allow the process He wishes to impart to begin in us.

It is easy for the Christian to equate the sin with the sinner, while not looking in the mirror.  We turn our righteous hatred for the evil acts into a blind and unrighteous desire to judge and inflict pain on the perpetrator of the evil, rather than try to redeem him from it.  While Christ stands always at the doors of our hearts knocking to be let in, His servants stand always in the streets with torches lit and pitchforks at the ready to seek out who may have been caught in public sin.  We hide our own atrocities and wish to publicly punish those who have been revealed in their own.  In this we serve not Christ but his adversary, Satan.

I do not blame the world for running in terror from a group so disposed to call for murder and then claim their God justifies their actions.  I do not blame the world for getting a horrifically incorrect picture of the character of our God.  I blame myself for it.  I blame my fellow brothers who claim His name and then have acted this way.  It is the Christians fault that God is so maligned.  It is the Christians fault for not living by the precepts that Christ outlined.  It is the worst of ironies that we are known more for our hatred and fear than our love and acceptance.  If we could only learn to hate and fear evil, while loving and accepting people, we would create an entirely different picture of our God than what we have offered the world so far.

Are there any left who will defend the honor of our God by simply loving as He loved?  Are there any left who will sacrifice their pride, humble their hearts, and learn to love unconditionally and without reservation?  Are there any Christians left in the world or have we all simply been lost to apathy …